company case study

Mike: Welcome to Coventry University and for taking part in this collaboration. Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself, what you do, what is your experience in business, about what role you take and where does it fit in the business? 

Simon: Sure, a pleasure to be here. I started out in banking, I joined Barclays as a graduate many, many years ago and did lot of different thigs with them, from leading a digital operation to leading their branch network across the country and in London. My time with Barclays has given me the skills and chance to lead large scales digital people, operations and businesses and I spend time at Santander, a Spanish company, a different culture, I was leading a national business there, delivering investment, international advice across the UK, and in the latter part of my career, I focused on public-private sector partnerships I did a number of years at Capita and now I work at People Plus. People Plus does 3 things: 16000 people across the UK who are helping transform people’s lives, we help people who are imprisoned and offer education for those who want to turn their lives around, we run a rehabilitation company, I help people that need access to carers to get those carers, we help people get long-term employment jobs for those who specialise to helping people start their own businesses and we deliver apprenticeships. From banking to making a big difference is my experience.

Mike: That’s great. That means you are very well experienced, and our next question is about leadership, how do you understand leadership on a team and company level?

Simon: I apply the same philosophy today in leading to the same when I started out regardless of the number of people in my team. I believe that people have a lot of potential and your job is to create the right climate and the right processes, environment for them to succeed to create a sense of what the future looks like as a vision, success what will feel like for them when they will get there. That’s how I approach things today: we have a statement of vision to make a difference in 1 million lives of people by 2022, we talk about the business and what the milestones of that journey will be, and I focus on the talent I need in order to achieve these goals, finding the best talent I can from outside the organisation and to bring them here and to find the best talent in the organisation and develop it. Leadership for me is about creating a clear view for people, create a climate for them to succeed in and let them get on with what they do best which is serving the clients we work with.

Mike: Right, that’s very interesting in terms of what students are looking at because we do a contrast between transformational and transactional leadership and that’s very much transformational. Are there times when transactional leadership works better?

Simon: There are times when you have businesses or team that need refocusing. In my experience that has to be a short time in order to get the business back on track, otherwise you end up creating a climate that is very slow moving. The businesses I have worked in have been successful have always looked up and looked at the future and be clear with people about the values, the culture in order to be successful. Rarely need you to get in that level of transactional leadership, it has its place when an underperforming business needs to go back on track and I don’t think will last for long.

Mike: There is a contrast between leading 10 people and 16000, I mean, the first one will be more personal than the second one, and surely there must be an accountability chain in order to work with larger numbers – can you comment on that?

Simon: I would argue that as a leader there shouldn’t be a difference between leading 10 or 16000 people, you should always operate with the same level of authenticity. I am passionate about my team is that you have to create a sense of dialogue with people and too often you need to find ways to create dialogue with your team as it’s so much easier now with the technics and methods to encourage that communication. I spend a lot of time communicating, I have a weekly, every Monday where I communicate with my team through email where they can exchange ideas and thoughts with me. The style of leadership is very important. With the accountability, as you get to bigger organisations, you must create processes and ways of making decision where you can delegate authority but it’s about finding the right talent in order to do that because it doesn’t matter how good your processes are if you haven’t got the right people you are bound to do things that will fall down. I am accountable to a board of directors, that board is a list of PLC that clearly have given me a responsibility to deliver the plan for my organisation over the 5 years that I set out and let me got through it through monthly reports progress and I apply the same processes for my businesses, it’s about what the success looks like and get the right people in place to do it.

Mike: How have you found that people respond to change, are there better ways of introducing people to change to people?

Simon: I’m sure many like leaders have made mistakes over the time throughout change, I am leading my current organisation through a lot of change and we are an industry that has been built on very long public sector contracts that run out every multiple years and the world is changing and we had to change quite quickly and dramatically and that can be quiet unsettling to people because suddenly the things they held as constants and gave them comfort were taken away and it is a destabilising things for them which is why I learnt that you always have to start with the ‘why’. Going back to the communication and be very clear about why we do what we do. With us being a profit-making organisation but we make significant change every day in the lives of people and the reason we want to change is to be an organisation that is successful with more people and that has a galvanising effect for people to understand why things are changing. I talk a lot about the environment, with one of the challenges you have to make them understand the outside wold and what’s happening outside as this can be overlooked. You can have very well-designed plans but when meeting the outside world and it can have a devastating effect as some companies are too focused on sticking with the plan and when reality hits them it hurts them and if they don’t learn to adapt and change they can fail.

Mike: In this day and age, to be more resilient and be more agile is much more necessary now than in earlier times.

Simon: It’s because of the pace the world is changing it’s quiet scary at the time and if you’re set out on a journey and you are expected that in a few years the same plans you had done at the beginning, you’re making a big mistake. 20 years ago that could’ve been a possibility but not now even more with the technology that we have.

Mike: It’s something that has to be imbedded with people that this is going to happen, it is going to be nature of life.

Simon: Yes, and it comes back to communication, dialogue and understand about the certain things that go within the organisation and they will get comfortable with that level of communication but you have to be prepared to explain uncomfortable things to people but explain that where we are aiming is a better place than where we are today.

Mike: One of the words we look at is communication and the systems and can you talk a bit about how the decisions are done and who makes them, how the communication is done.

Simon: It’s easy in this world to focus on the tool and not the message and I advise that the best way to communicate is to think what you want to communicate and then how it will be delivered. The message is the one that matters and how it is received. We use a wide variety of methods to communicate: emails, intra-net, face to face and I think communication needs to be adapted according to what needs to be communicated. When needing to deliver transformational or change, a human being is better to be seen and a face to face approach is better. In terms of decision-making process, one of the things that I a constant challenge for companies, even for big ones, is that they need to struck a balance between good governance and good decision-making. It’s a constant balance and to allow people and leaders to be the way they are and to encourage them to have a say. Banks are very regulated and strict, and it matters is that you focus on the right decisions on the right level and a constant message to my team is always check when you aren’t sure what you’re doing and beg forgiveness if you fail and I want people to feel empowered during the organisation. We don’t do a lot of heavy steering groups or committees, but we do reviews each month where the business understands the talent, the progress. I believe that a successful organisation will empower people and the culture of the business shows them that if they need support they will be receiving it.

Mike: Next question is about the future, how do you see the future in your business area and could you frame this is terms of internal/external threats, opportunities for your business.

Simon: My industry is going through a lot of change and my business is and when I joined the company there was a strategy that was seeking new contracts and we’ve reoriented the business to focus on the macro on the market place. The opportunities that we are focused on as an organisation are 5 macro trends?: UK productivity challenge, demand in health and social care, increased devolving of accountability to devolve government and to local moralities to drive localised agendas, increased focus on rehabilitative justice system, increased level of employers on health and wellbeing. We are thinking on how to approach those trends and to include them in our business. We see a real opportunity for us to grow in those areas. A big challenge for all organisations is the use of technologies and for those who haven’t really traditionally used technology as part of their business. One way you can make a change in prisons is by using technology and we put a TV in a prison that connects to an Open University channel.

Mike: You are expecting that in 10 years’ time the prison system will be very different.

Simon: Yes. Prisons environments will be technology environments, but they are changing environments and need to be much more innovative and creative about the ways which you do it. I think the big threat to our sector is there is an environment where private sector organisations working with the public sector and we have a lot of political challenge and then we have to think very carefully about our values as an organisation and what are the other ways which we can demonstrate that we add to the greater good society as opposed to being just a profit making organisation.

Mike: In terms of political challenge, you mean private organisations may have different objectives and measures of success and linking those to the public sector organisations is not an easy mix.

Simon: There is a political threat about the private organisations working in public sector is not a good thing. I think it’s our job how we demonstrate the greater value that we can add, we have a whole list of different ways in which we do that but that is definitely one of the threats to our sector and organisation. The final dimension to it is that there is a sector under a lot of pressure and thinking about how to grow in this is a key strategy for us.

Mike: We have another question here, it’s about the international dimension, is it possible to comment on the cultural differences, approaches that need to be used when working with people from different places in the world?

Simon: I have been fortunate in my career to work in 2 global businesses, Barclays and Santander, and when I worked at Barclays it was a very strong American leadership and I enjoyed the culture and you have to spend some time in order to understand the differences and the way they are. When I worked at Santander, I learned Spanish business values that are different to the British ones and learning how to adapt and deal with that is very important. I think that if you want to work in organisations that want to trade with the rest of the world, is exciting to be in these environments because there is a lot of creative development comes from these cultures when together and it does require you to take a step back and understand where people are coming from, language can be a barrier.

Mike: Could you give a question for our students to focus on when writing their assignment?

Simon: Given the strategic environment which people are looking to grow and operate how would you lead the organisation through that change?

Mike: Thank you very much.

Simon: My pleasure.